WASHINGTON - In a move that marks a major
change in policy, Washington's influential
ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has
disclosed that President George W Bush has
authorized him to open direct talks with Iran
about stabilizing Iraq.
The announcement
came in an interview with Newsweek magazine. The
two countries have not held direct talks since
mid-May 2003, shortly after the US ouster of
Saddam Hussein.
At that time, the
administration charged that al-Qaeda attacks
carried out in Saudi Arabia had been coordinated
from Iranian territory. It promptly broke off an
ongoing diplomatic dialogue with
Iran
in Geneva that was led by Khalilzad himself and
dealt primarily with Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I've been authorized by the president to
engage the Iranians as I engaged them in
Afghanistan directly," Khalilzad told Newsweek.
"There will be meetings, and that's also a
departure and an adjustment [to US policy)."
The decision to reopen direct talks with
Iran, which has not yet reacted to Khalilzad's
announcement, provoked a heated
intra-administration debate earlier this fall
about engaging Iran more deeply, particularly in
light of US concerns - and threats - concerning
Tehran's nuclear program.
Some hardliners,
including neo-conservatives associated with the
Committee on the Present Danger, have urged the
administration to open an interest section in
Tehran to gain more direct access to and
intelligence about opposition groups. They argue
that with sufficient US support, these groups
could subvert the regime in much the same way that
US support for Solidarity in Poland allegedly
helped create the conditions for the end of
communist rule there.
The latest move goes
against those who have warned against any steps
that could be seen as granting the Iranian
administration international legitimacy,
particularly in light of the hardline rhetoric of
the country's new president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
"On the one hand, I think it's a good idea
to maintain back-channel contacts with
adversaries," said Raymond Tanter, a former
National Security Council staffer, whose Iran
Policy Committee has called for Washington to
deploy against Tehran the Iraq-based Mujahideen-e
Khalq, which is listed as a terrorist group by the
State Department.
"On the other hand, when
you go public after Ahmadinejad says he wants to
wipe Israel off the map, it seems to reward
Iranian belligerence. I don't know why it's being
done."
But to a critic of the hardliners,
University of Michigan Middle East historian Juan
Cole, the message was clear. "It's a sign of
desperation and a recognition that [the
administration] needs Iranian goodwill to get out
of Iraq," he told Inter Press Service. "To the
extent you can have a soft landing in Iraq, the
Iranians have to be involved."
Indeed,
Khalilzad depicted the decision as part of a more
general strategy, long urged by realists such as
Bush Senior's national security adviser, Brent
Scowcroft, and some Democrats, including the
party's ranking foreign policy spokesman, Senator
Joseph Biden, to enlist the cooperation of
Baghdad's neighbors in stabilizing Iraq
sufficiently to permit a substantial drawdown of
US troops.
That goal has become far more
urgent in the past month as public support for the
US presence in Iraq has plummeted, as has
confidence in Bush's performance there and in the
general "war on terror".
As Bush's poll
numbers have dropped to levels not seen since the
Richard Nixon administration in the early 1970s,
Democrats have become more aggressive in urging a
major policy shift toward realism, while
Republicans have grown restive. The White House
was badly shaken earlier this month when a
majority of Senate Republicans voted with
Democrats to require the administration to submit
regular reports on prospects for withdrawing
substantial numbers of troops in 2006 and progress
in training Iraqi troops to take their place.
Even if the administration has been slow -
at least rhetorically - to react to the erosion of
public support, the Pentagon, particularly senior
military officers who have been talking up the
necessity of a substantial withdrawal in 2006
since last summer, has seen the writing on the
wall for some time.
According to a number
of published reports, the Pentagon has prepared
plans to begin withdrawing large numbers of the
nearly 160,000 US troops currently deployed in
Iraq to about 140,000 soon after next month's
elections, to about 115,000 by next July and about
10,000 or less by next November's mid-term
Congressional elections.
But those hopes
are based not only on the military's ability to
train and equip tens of thousands of members of
Iraq's armed forces and police, but also on a
political strategy to both reduce the strength and
virulence of the largely Sunni insurgency. At the
same time, it is key to ensure that Shi'ite
groups, especially the Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), that are most closely
tied to Tehran, are prepared to go along with any
measures that may be needed to pacify the Sunnis.
It is in this light that the intensified
diplomacy within the region of the past several
weeks should be seen - particularly last week's
Arab League meeting in Cairo where both Sunni and
Shi'ite Iraqi parties, as well as the
predominantly Sunni Arab governments that make up
the league, joined together to call for
reconciliation and a withdrawal of non-Arab
troops. The fact that Iraqi President Jalal
Talabani, who has long been close to Iran, flew
immediately to Tehran after the meeting did not go
unnoticed.
Nor was it missed in Washington
that, two weeks after Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice publicly raised the possibility
of direct talks with Iran, Deputy Prime Minister
Ahmad Chalabi, a long-time friend of Khalilzad who
had fallen out of favor in Washington 18 months
ago amid charges that he was working with Iranian
intelligence, held high-level talks in Tehran just
before arriving in Washington in early November
for the first time in two years.
While
Chalabi was received rapturously by hardline
neo-conservatives at the American Enterprise
Institute, which did so much to champion his
efforts to bring US troops to Iraq, it now appears
that his official reception by senior
administration officials, including Rice, National
Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Vice President
Dick Cheney, was linked to his perceived
usefulness in extricating those troops from a
political quagmire - and, more specifically,
gaining Tehran's cooperation in doing so.
"Perhaps that's why he was given such a
good reception," noted Cole.
Washington's
growing reliance on and support for regional
diplomacy marks a serious setback to
neo-conservatives who, long before the Iraq war,
had championed the unilateral imposition of a Pax
Americana in the Middle East that would put an end
to what in their view constituted the chief
threats to Israel's security - Arab nationalism
and Iranian theocracy.
Now, two-and-a-half
years after invading Iraq to put that peace into
place, the administration finds itself seeking the
support of both forces.
